Fatima, the Marian Age, and the Devil’s Century

Crux, 12 May 2017

In the great slaughterhouse of the twentieth century, the sheer scale of lethal evil, organized above all in the communist regimes, appeared to have loosed Satan himself in the world. In this context, the apparitions of Fatima were addressed directly to the wickedness of the twentieth century, as well as to the wickedness of sin that lurks in all of history.

The apparitions at Fatima are the key moment of a Marian age that the Church has been living for nearly two centuries. They are also at the heart of a century in which the devil was on the march.

Consider this: In 2017 falls the three hundredth anniversary of the Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida in Brazil, but the first Latin American pope will not visit the world’s largest Marian shrine. He will be, though, in Fatima on Saturday for the hundredth anniversary of the first apparition there on 13th May 1917.